Author Strives To Temper Anger Between The Races

June 26, 1999|By PATRICK LEE PLAISANCE Daily Press

Stung by suspicious glances on the bus and bruised by years of incessant, subtle racial snubs, Bruce A. Jacobs is an American black man who got tired of simply shaking his head in despair of improving race relations in this country. So, he wrote a book.

He offers no path to salvation, no formula for redemption. Indeed, the 44-year-old prize-winning poet readily says he has few solutions of any kind. But he knows one thing for sure: The hate-filled crazies and separatists, both black and white, who get so much media attention have hijacked the debate and endangered us all. And if America is going to survive, thoughtful people must reclaim the issue.

Painful and awkward as it may be, we must grope our way out of our uneasy climate of fear and distrust, Jacobs says in his book, "Race Manners: Navigating the Minefield Between Black and White Americans." Blacks must accept that most whites would not rather lynch them, whites must stop misperceiving blacks as threatening hoodlums, and both must figure out a way to deal with their anger toward each other.

"That's the point of my book," Jacobs said. "There's no neat way to dissipate the anger. The anger belongs there, and it belongs in the conversation. My point is we can collaboratively, as a society, survive the anger if we're willing to deal with it."

Jacobs, whose sister, Susan, graduated from Hampton University in the mid-1980s, will read from his book and lead a discussion at 4 p.m. Sunday at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Hampton.

In a conversational style that avoids heavy- handed analyses or academic lingo, Jacobs offers real-world scenarios fraught with racial tension - the interracial couple scorned by others, the shock of a white person meeting a black man who doesn't use vernacular speech patterns after the two had a phone conversation.

A good start, he said, would be for everyone to pay less attention to television news. The inordinate number of handcuffed young black crime suspects who fill the screen, he said, makes up the "predominant image of people of color that many white suburbanites see," Jacobs said.

"One of the profound jobs for whites is to start to see through that misrepresentation. They are actually pretty clueless as to what blacks are really like."

In his book, Jacobs also writes that whites must try to understand black vernacular speech before making a knee-jerk judgment that it reflects inferiority.

"Slaves were literally and figuratively battered with the message that African speech was not only backward but criminal, and that the language and culture of white Americans were superior," he writes. Slaves rebelled by using secret systems of speech, often as code - what Jacobs calls "an act of creativity that continues to this day."

Jacobs also does not shirk from confronting unequal treatment of blacks at the hands of police, referring to "the utter denial of the spectacular brazenness with which police reserve special scrutiny - and abuse - for black people."

"If you are white, the first thing you need to understand is that black people are not making this stuff up," he writes.

Blacks, on the other hand, must acknowledge that "most whites who embrace prejudicial notions about blacks aren't evil people," he said.

"They're basically decent people who have inherited bad ideas by default," he said. "You deal with an evil person differently than you deal with a person who would act better if they knew better."

Jacobs makes several suggestions for such real- world scenes, but his bottom line is as ancient as racial tension itself: People need to stop reacting to skin color and start seeing individuals, and stop making others feel uncomfortable as punishment for trying to talk honestly about race relations. And they must venture beyond their comfortable same-race circles.

"That climate poisons the interpersonal interchange," Jacobs said. "It's not so much that people innately want to be separate; they feel the climate will punish them if they move outward. So they stay separate. Both sides must demand that we change the climate.

"While we're turning our backs on one another, the crazies on the fringes will be upping the ante on the conflict," he said

"The only one among us with all the racial answers," Jacobs writes in his book, "are the racists."

Want to go?

* Hear Bruce A. Jacobs read from his new book, "Race Manners," and lead a discussion on race relations at 4 p.m. Sunday at St. Mark's Episcopal Church, 2235 W. Queen St., Hampton.